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When the Western Carolina men's basketball team takes the floor Saturday for a home game vs. Samford, it will mark the end of a slow time in which the Catamounts will have played just one game in 13 days.

And the 2 p.m. start at the Ramsey Center starts a grueling stretch of four Southern Conference games over eight days.

Such vagaries in scheduling is thanks to the difficulty in planning games for an 11-team league, and so far the strange timing hasn't thrown off the Catamounts (10-8, 3-0) who are tied for second with Davidson and just 1/2-game behind Chattanooga in the early league standings. ...